Richard G. Lipsey and Patricio Meller (eds.), Western Hemisphere Trade Integration: A Canadian-Latin American Dialogue (London: Macmillan, 1997)

Elizabeth Joyce and Carlos Malamud (eds.), Latin America and the Multinational Drug Trade (London: Macmillan, 1998)

Barry Bosworth, Susan M. Collins and Nora Claudia Lustig (eds.), Coming Together? Mexico-United States Relations (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997)

James F. Rochlin, Redefining Mexican ‘Security’: Society, State and Region under NAFTA (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997)

Lawrence E. Harrison, The Pan-American Dream: Do Latin America's Cultural Values Discourage True Partnership with the United States and Canada? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997)

Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres (eds.), The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)

International studies of the Americas have been dominated for at least the last forty years by an orthodoxy which framed the field of study as constituting the relations of the United States with the governments of something called ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’ (hereafter LAC). Often, as it happens, the Caribbean part of that construction was largely excluded from vision, especially the non-Spanish-speaking parts of that region; Canada was ignored almost as often; and the United States, needless to say, was automatically viewed as central. In power politics terms, this was understandable enough. The US perceived itself as a hegemonic power and associated its credibility in the eyes of both its enemies and allies in all parts of the world with its capacity to maintain and demonstrate control of its own hemispheric community—its ‘backyard’. Yet what we can now see is that the politics of this recent past (defined essentially as the Cold War period) were distinctive, not typical, in the longer history of US interactions with the rest of the Americas.